17/07/2026
IMPERIALISM IS TERRORISM: TRUMP, RUBIO, AND THE MOST VICIOUS TERRORISTS ARE IN THE WHITE HOUSE
Arnold Padilla
Secretary General, ILPS Philippines
The most vicious terrorist of the modern era is not the oppressed peoples struggling for liberation. It is US imperialism represented today by President Donald Trump, his Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and their Right-wing and neo-conservative ilk.
US imperialism's “Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism,” convened by Rubio, equates Marxism, anti-imperialism, anti-fascism, national liberation, and revolutionary politics with terrorism. Such framing, as articulated by Rubio in his opening remarks at the ministerial, casts those who resist domination, oppression, and exploitation as criminals while justifying the reactionary violence perpetrated with immense brutality and blatant impunity by the US monopoly capitalist state. Trump and Rubio's latest political project targets social movements that challenge imperialist power by expanding intelligence cooperation, financial surveillance, and coordinated repression.
Rubio’s repeated invocation of “terrorism”, echoed as well by other top Trump officials during the ministerial, serves to delegitimize dissent while normalizing political repression and human rights violations. Mirroring the post-9/11 counter-terrorism campaign, which branded all Islamist resistance and anti-imperialist movements as terrorist groups, Rubio aims to justify expanded US military intervention against nations and movements that resist US hegemony. The ministerial appears designed to validate this campaign in Latin America and the Caribbean, a region the US claims as its exclusive sphere of influence under the so-called Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.
By deliberately conflating left-wing political activism with transnational terrorism and invoking historical Latin American insurgencies like the Tupamaros, Montoneros, FARC, and ELN alongside modern anti-capitalist movements, the Trump regime seeks to construct a monolithic ideological enemy out of any resistance to US imperialism.
This rhetorical strategy serves to legitimize an expansion of Washington’s interventionist apparatus under the guise of national security. By specifically targeting Cuba's “sprawling intelligence and ideological network” and demanding a coordinated, cross-border law enforcement crackdown, Rubio lays the groundwork for a new wave of securitization, militarization, and aggression across Latin America and the Caribbean, signaling that the US will intensify its suppression of political and ideological non-conformity in its self-proclaimed sphere of influence.
Thus, the ministerial is obviously less about countering actual threats to US national security and more about crushing legitimate, systemic critiques of global monopoly capitalism and US dominance. Rubio’s sweeping vilification of left-wing movements as a “revolt of the worst against the best” strips these movements of their material, historical contexts, namely, their resistance to decades of US-backed dictatorships, economic exploitation, and corporate plunder.
By establishing initiatives like the National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, which targets anti-fascist movements and networks, and advocating for the weaponization of the global financial system to “debank” political dissidents, the Trump regime seeks to institutionalize the criminalization of anti-imperialist dissent. Ultimately, this framework functions as a tool of empire, designed to intimidate sovereign nations that stray from Washington's political and economic interests and agenda, and protect the entrenched power structures of imperialism at the expense of the self-determination and rights of the peoples across the world.
For more than a century, the US has exercised global power through military force, covert operations, economic coercion, and political intervention. It orchestrated coups to topple independent governments, supported murderous dictatorships that suppress peoples’ movements, carried out wide-ranging and debilitating economic sanctions that punish peoples, and waged wars of aggression that have reduced cities and societies to rubble.
Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Palestine, and Iran, to name a few, are monuments to imperialist devastation and ruthless terrorism: millions killed, generations displaced, and societies left impoverished and insecure. US wars in the past 25 years alone have already killed 4.5 to 4.7 million people and displaced over 38 million worldwide.
Rubio, in his speech, said that the anti-capitalists, anti-imperialists, communists, and Marxists are driven by “an overwhelming need to tear down what greater men have built, to wreck what is beautiful”. Trump and Rubio have launched their illegitimate war on Iran and have been desperately trying to tear down the great civilization that the Iranian people have built, like what US imperialism has done to other countries that refuse to bow down to the empire, driven by its overwhelming desire to preserve its global hegemony. The US-backed Zionist genocide in Gaza has been killing every day up to 61 civilians, including roughly 21 children. There is nothing beautiful in imperialism, only the ugliness of death and destruction.
Domestically, it spells terrible danger for political activists in the US who are on the frontlines opposing Trump’s harsh immigration policy, imperialist wars, and other anti-people programs. By broadening the definition of terrorism to include anti-fascist, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist positions, the state creates a legal pretext to weaponize federal law enforcement against its own citizens. This ideological reframing paves the way for heightened surveillance, the infiltration of progressive organizations, and the preemptive criminalization of peaceful assembly, recasting legitimate political expression as a direct threat to the state.
Rubio and other US officials attempt to erase the social and political conditions that give rise to the peoples’ resistance by labeling their movements “far left terrorism”. Workers organize because they are exploited; peasants struggle because they are landless; Indigenous Peoples resist because their ancestral domains are seized. Peoples rise in arms because a foreign power occupies them. The aspiration for self-determination, national liberation, and socialism arises from the desire to end the cruelty and wretchedness brought about by monopoly-capitalist exploitation and oppression and to build something truly beautiful, founded on genuine liberation, social justice, and lasting peace.
US imperialism is perpetrating structural violence against the peoples and systematic plunder of resources in its colonies and neo-colonies. Workers are squeezed dry, farmers lose their land, communities are displaced, and the environment is degraded in the name of US monopoly profits and global hegemony. To struggle against imperialist war and plunder, whether through street activism or through revolutionary armed resistance, is just and legitimate.
To fight the terror of imperialism is always just and legitimate. # # #
